Our brain is designed to comprehend images and visuals in a much better way. But it is a challenge to develop a technology that understands pictures as quickly as humans can. Visual search thereby demands machine learning techniques and tools to generate similar and equivalent results. Consumers and marketers are heavily dependant on search engines for their needs and convenience. However, despite all the speculations and difficulties, Google has now made the dream of visual searching viable. And as it has started to spread more wings, every Internet Marketing Agency is keen to know more about the future of Visual Search in SEO. So, let us discuss more on the possibilities it holds for us.

Importance of Visual Search in terms of SEO

What is Visual Search?

Visual search works on the same concept as we do to identify objects based on visual cues. It is a perpetual task that involves active scanning of the surrounding in order to determine a particular target amongst other irrelevant targets or distractors.

There are however three important visual search processes that are deployed by major search companies.

Traditional Image Search that completely depends on textual queries.

Reverse Image Search that banks on structured data in order to identify equivalent characteristics.

Pixel-by-Pixel Image Search that categorizes by parts of an image.

Note that Image Search and Visual Search are not same.

What does Visual Search mean for SEO?

Search engines are now already accomplished of videos and image indexing that allows ranking on SERPs. We are also aware of the terminologies- Image SEO and Video SEO via social media platforms like Pinterest and Youtube. However, visual Search has largely challenged Image SEO and has become a cumbersome task to be followed.

Presently, SEO has been running in parallel with visual search via image optimization, alt-tagging, schema markup, and metadata. Structured data/Schema markup and metadata are however the only crucial aspects for SEO in Visual Search. This is mainly because the feature requires very less inclusion of texts and in future, this data would be the only source of textual information to allow search engines to crawl.

Cataloging images carefully with microdata might be a monotonous task but it also provides an enhanced description that can help to rank higher and better in visual search after pairing with an optimized image.

Metadata is also as important and vital for performing SEO for visual search. It has the potential to drive online traffic to a website and services. Metadata is suppressed under HTML of websites and images but it allows search engines to discover relevant pieces of information.

However, to cope up with the advancement of visual search, adding additional strategies to the existing SEO framework is very much required.

If you want to know more about Visual Search and Search Engine Optimization, drop a comment below. We will surely get back to you!